


Dreams of Future Past

by SouthernContinentSkies



Series: Vorkosigan-TOG Fusion-verse [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020), Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Andy Lives, Any Sci-Fi can be Fusion with TOG with the right attitude, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fusion, Gen, Spaceships, Time Period: Time of Isolation, Vorkosigan pre-canon, but only by implication sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26070862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthernContinentSkies/pseuds/SouthernContinentSkies
Summary: Much later, the Old Guard finds a new member, in an inconvenient place.
Series: Vorkosigan-TOG Fusion-verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1898542
Comments: 19
Kudos: 97





	Dreams of Future Past

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to get into this fandom beyond reading other people's history research, but then someone said "sci-fi fusion," and now here I am. A previous version of this was posted on tumblr.

A thousand years afterwards - after Andy almost dies, after they get Quynh back, after humanity finally gets far enough into space to bother with - they finally get a spaceship.

"I don't see what the point is, if none of us is going to get pilot implants," Booker grumbles. "We'll have to hire someone every time we actually _go_ anywhere."

Andy shrugs. "None of us could fly an airplane, either. We'll make it work."

And they do, for the most part. Pilots aren't cheap, but the proliferation of human habitats has finally taken some of the pressure off of modern identity tracking, and unfortunately, a small mercenary group of no fixed abode besides their second-hand ship is not a remarkable sight, these days. Once they have a good enough set of combat armor, they avoid Earth. It's a good place to find a fight, in the absence of a unified planetary government, but a bad place to avoid scrutiny, if they ever want to go anywhere else.

They wander around the trade hubs - Tau Ceti, Zoave Twilight, the Hegen Hub - and pick up jobs from everyone but Jackson's Whole. They're too small for most things, but the bigger mercenary outfits sometimes need subcontractors, and they're the perfect size for covert exfiltration - rescues. That works for them.

* * *

Three hundred years later, they finally dream of someone new.

The first dream is confused, and confusing. His death is a stab wound, from behind; his assailant, hidden in the shadows of the dirty alleyway, with a purple twilit sky behind. With that alone, he could be anywhere; a slum on any of at least a dozen inhabited planets. Ruling out ships and stations - and Beta Colony, underground - makes it easier, but it's still a lot of ground to cover. There's not enough to go on; they'll have to wait.

The second dream is better, but also worse.

They can see his face, this time. His age is difficult to tell: anything between a hard-worn thirty and a very youthful middle age, which might be anything between fifty and seventy-five, these days. The dirt and stubble on his face don't help. Joe's sketch shows strong cheekbones, hooded eyes, dark, close-cut hair - and below it, the sort of padded cloth armor that rings a bit nostalgic for the older four.

"That can't be right," Quynh says, eyes narrowed. "It looks like linen. Nobody uses that for armor anymore. It'd be almost as expensive as polyfiber."

"Yeah," Joe says. "But I know what I saw." 

"He had a crossbow, too, I think," Nicky says, interrupting them. "Slung across his back, folded up. The stock was wood."

The others are quiet. They’ve come across modern versions of the crossbow in the age of carbon nano-fiber and ceramo-steel, but none of them has seen a wooden one in over a thousand years.

“What kind of crossbow was it?” Joe asks.

“The _wrong_ kind,” Nicky says, because he’s seen a lot of wooden crossbows over the centuries, but none of them looked like this.

(Later, they realize that most of Barrayar’s early Time of Isolation weapons were cannibalized from First-Wave vehicle parts, and subsequent wood-based designs had to work around the fact that there were no more carbon-steel springs. The resulting aesthetics got a bit... complicated. Nicky just shakes his head, and shows Kazov the sleek lines of the House Fell mini-ballista they picked off a Jacksonian Baron after a job, and learns some versions of Russian profanity even Andy’s never heard. The evolution of language is a beautiful thing.)

Eventually, they find an article on the Lost Colony of three hundred years ago, and they understand. They also give up; the dreams nag at them, but away from the string of wormholes lit by humanity, the dark of deep space is infinitely more vast than Earth’s sea.

The day they make the decision, Quynh shuts herself up in the engine room for two full shifts. They leave her be. The next day, she's back at the mess table like usual, guzzling coffee and snapping cards with Nile and Andy, but she's quieter, for awhile.

And things move on, and on, for another three hundred years.

* * *

And then, suddenly, the dreams change. Death by crossbow, and sword, and falling from a castle wall, the now-familiar hazards of their nameless brother's oddly rustic life, turn into death by screaming, melting poison. And again, and again: a cloud of choking, blinding gas stops his lungs; a sip of well water makes his jaw lock and his limbs convulse; an invisible enemy rips through the line of fellow soldiers, dropping them in sequence, until he smells the faint tang of cinnamon, and his heart seizes, and he, too, falls.

Their lost brother has been wading through a sea of different wars on the surface of his isolated homeworld, not so different from the regional upheavals in the Europe of Nicky and Joe’s immortal adolescence, but this is new.

These are not the weapons of a planet that has barely mastered gunpowder.

It takes only a quick dip into the news network of the nearest station to find their destination: Barrayar, the rediscovered colony, beyond the trading junction of Komarr, off the Hegen Hub. They’ve been reconnected to the Nexus for several years, apparently, but the rudimentary comm beacon on their side of the wormhole has sent no recent news.

“Well, there wouldn’t be any yet,” Nile says, staring at the holomap of the Nexus wormhole routes. “Even a priority message would take more than a week to get all the way here. I guess the dreams are instantaneous.” She frowns. “That’s going to be a problem. Forget immortality, the idea of FTL comms would be more than enough to make us a target.”

“What?” says Nicky.

Joe sighs, and goes to dial up their contact with the pilots’ guild.

* * *

Barrayar is less of a mess than they feared, at least from space. The Cetagandans appear to be settling into the long haul of an occupation, rather than the short strike of a slaughter. They bring their shuttle in on one of the few trajectories that won’t cross the corvettes on orbital picket, and set down at the outskirts of a dense forest, avoiding the nearby towns and farm fields in the other direction.

The next night, they get lucky, though their brother doesn’t. The crackle of a nerve disruptor, this time, rather than the choke of gas. From the look of the trees behind him, he’s close.

“Which makes sense,” Booker says. “They can only get on and off the planet the same ways we could have come in, if they don’t want to die.”

When they find him, a week and two skirmishes later, his uniform is ragged, and the black as much from soot and blood as from the dye, but the silver rose and laurel is still recognizable on the chest and shoulders. A Vorbarra armsman, of all things, personally sworn to the service of Barrayar’s beleaguered emperor.

This makes their recruitment pitch... interesting.

“How did you think you were going to keep this a secret?” Andy demands, leaning on her axe. She's on edge; the clearing they've stopped in is only a few miles away from what apparently is Emperor Dorca’s own encampment.

Their brother's name, or what he gives them of it, is Kazov. The cheekbones Joe had sketched so many times reflect the firelight above his stubble; his eyes, averted, don't.

“I wasn’t," he says finally. “He already knows. How do you think I got the job?”

Booker chokes. Joe and Nile stare. Nicky facepalms.

Quynh, though, spits in the dirt, and Andy snorts. Of course. A man with immortal soldier powers can be an asset, with a strong enough leash; a woman can only ever be a threat.

“Doesn’t your death release you?” asks Nicky, who has paid more attention to what passes for religion on this planet than the rest of his family.

Kazov looks troubled. “It does,” he says. “But... then I would be released.”

The rest of them look at each other. Three hundred years alone, at the very beginning, is a long time. Not at long as Andy went, but longer than any of the rest of them. Even Qunyh was less.

“You have us now,” Nile says.

He looks around the group. His eyes linger on each of them: the ring on Booker’s finger; the way Quynh and Andy stand close enough to touch, but don’t; Nicky’s sword. There’s a hunger at the edges of his gaze, but his jaw is set.

“I don’t know you,” he says. “And I have a duty to the Emperor.”

He stands to leave.

The others flick their eyes to Andy, but she only snorts again. They make no move to block him as he breaks the circle, and disappears into the trees.

The minute he's gone, Andy kicks the dirt into the low-burning fire.

"Come on," she says. "Back to the shuttle, before any scouts find us."

"Is that it?" Booker asks, incredulous. "We're just going to leave him here?"

"Of course not," Andy says, narrowing her eyes in the direction of Kazov's exit. "He's got a fight here. They all do; swords against spaceships, with a lot of civilians trapped in the middle. We're here already; we might as well help him with it."

And she picks up her axe.


End file.
